Tracy McGrady
Tracy McGrady is another example of a player whose promising career was derailed by injury too early, but when he was good, he was really good. He twice led the entire league in scoring before he turned 25, and he averaged at least 20-5-5 six times.
McGrady came straight to the NBA from high school, but he didn't become a star until his 4th season, when he would have been a college senior. That's the season when he left Toronto and Vince Carter's shadow and became a star in his own right in Orlando. That year he improved his scoring average by 11.4 points and won the Most Improved Player Award while making the All-Star team and All-NBA Second Team.
He continued to improve over the next two years, until the 2003 season, when he led the league with 32.1 points per game while grabbing 6.5 rebounds and passing out 5.5 assists per game. That year he also shot a career-high .457 from the field, which would drop off considerably every season afterward. After one more season of leading the league in scoring, he was traded to the Houston Rockets for Steve Francis.
In Houston he continued to be a star, but he only finished in the top 10 in scoring twice in 5 full seasons, and he missed 113 games over that time, which caused the Rockets to struggle in the postseason. In fact, McGrady was probably the best player in NBA history who never got past the first round of the playoffs until he took a free ride on the Spurs bench to reach the 2013 Finals. It wasn't really his fault, because his postseason numbers were pretty impressive. Just look at what he did from 2001 to 2005:
McGrady - 31.6 pts, 6.8 reb, 6.1 ast, 1.5 stl
While he may have failed to advance in the playoffs and fell from his peak far too early, McGrady has to be remembered as a great player. He averaged over 20 points per game in 8 straight seasons, led the league in scoring twice, and made the All-NBA First Team twice, but he can't be considered one of the 50 greatest of all time without being a real part of any playoff series win.
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